Gay and Lesbian Times has reviewed Life As We Show It in its feature by Richard Labonte,
"Splash into Summer Books." Here's the review, published on Thursday, August 20, 2009, in issue 1130:
Life As We Show It: Writing on Film
edited by Brian Pera and Masha Tupitsyn
City Lights Books
304 pages, $18.95 paper
Dodie Bellamy immerses herself in thoughts of E.T. while coping with her mother’s dying. Wayne Koestenbaum riffs on the gender “puzzle” that is Elizabeth Taylor. Bard Cole considers both the veiled porn implicit in mainstream movies featuring young men, and the life of erotica icon Joey Stefano. Richard Grayson exhumes the film screens of his Florida youth. Abdellah Taia, sitting with his dozing mother in a darkened Moroccan room, recalls finding sexual self-realization watching a queer French movie on TV. Rebecca Brown overlays her own life with imagery from classic westerns. In these smart essays, few short stories, a poem and a screenplay, 25 entries in all, contributors – obviously smitten by cinema both contemporary and classic – cast a personal eye on a universal medium. They aren’t reviewing films, though. Instead, these writers muse on how film and life are intertwined, how they find themselves on screen and those screens in turn reflect them. Settle in with a box of Twizzlers and revel in the provocative thinking in this fresh take on popular culture.
---
Richard Labonte has been reading, editing, selling and writing about queer literature since the mid ’70s.
No comments:
Post a Comment